I'm reading through these old textfiles,
completely blown away. I was also in the 914 area
code, with the absurd little handle King Kilroy (like
most of the handles, it didn't make much sense or have
any meaning, but we were all stuck with one), and I
also called Sherwood Forest all the time. As I
remember it, that was the best of the 914s. Then I
remember discovering the "war games dialers" (then
called something else, since the movie war games
hadn't come out yet) and getting my first batch of
sprint codes and so being able to call outside the 914
area code, and calling..... can't remember most of
them. I remember a really good one in the 617 area
code called Xavier or something like that, one of the
earlier ones with a harddrive, a whopping 10 megs. I
went so far as to sell the damn codes in the line in
my school cafeteria, calling them "payphone codes".
It seemed like a great deal to sell a hacked calling
card code for a ham sandwich. Luckily that didn't
catch on beyond just a few friends.
I remember my father getting nervous when our phone
bill went from astronomical to minimal even while I
was using the thing five times as often, calling, as
he knew, five times as far. Then I got the pivotal
second phone line, so it was trading goofy atarisoft
games all night over the applecat modem, which went at
a blazing 1200 buad, which as everyone knew was the
terminal speed for a modem, the fastest speed
theoretically possible.
It strikes me as intersting that instead of email we
used voice messages or, since this was before even
answering machines, regular old phone tag, at least
when the person's line wasn't busy for hours and
hours, since this was even before call waiting.
Then I remember the dreaded advent of ESS, when
suddenly all phone calls could be easily traced. No
more making conference calls with every friend I could
think to call, and no more war games dialing, or at
least much less. Even calling TSS to get the credit
ratings of my parent's friends got a little harder.
Then that damn article "Night of the Hackers" in
Newsweek, and suddenly everyone was getting arrested,
or at least everyone said everyone was getting
arrested. I re-read that article last year, and
there's a line in it something like "you're constantly
reminded how young these people are", and I'm sure it
was true, but at the time it seemed like we were prime
players in some sort of international espionage drama.
Then Newsweek printed the sequel, "Return of the
Night of the Hackers", detailing how the author had
been deluged with hundreds of mailorder toilet seats
and crap like that, then at the end of the month
getting billed for all of it on his credit card.
That's pretty much when I left the scene so I don't
know what happened next. 1985?
Anyway, thanks for the amazing archive, I still have
shivers.
King Kilroy
Now for equally absurd reasons called:
Hugh Mann
http://wrybread.com